Edited by Sarah Dowling

Poems by Sabyasachi Sanyal

although a door is free from the usual constraintsa room is notso is reality

Reality, I have decided to cut it some slack

Just can’t bear this moaning undercurrentsawingceaseless

I would pass through the winterAnd winter would pass through me

It’s a dealwhere everybody wins

—Mr. Bean said — All realizations are interpretation of data acquired by your senses. Since, all senses are suspect, realizations attained through them are deemed uncertain, suspect.

—

Eventually it all boils down to comprehensioneven if you spell it allit bothers at spotsmarooned and wisememories trying to decrypt their inner memoriesI have spilled enough to knowno memory is worth courting, hanging out with —in a backyard sunand thenthere are memories that arefelled futures

a teacupthat never went back to China

—

Bracketcity, ignorant as I am, it took me 37 years to realize that you actually need an appropriate language of thought. And now I am dumbstruck by its implications, considering the empty graveyards where language blossoms, its coherent fences, colors, strictures, variable degrees of freedoms …

—Mr. Bean said — life comes a full circle I am thinking — A circle is a denominator of my own loneliness permeating through society and landscape encompassing but leaving things alone to their own self

everything is a necessity down hereeven this perverse deployment of inevitability

—

Mr. Bean said — Go easy on these thoughts as all they lead to is amassingfear and paranoiaBracketcity

my innards know — this testimony that the stone yields to the hammer — is a conspiracyThe stone yields to its own uncertainty and the hammer yields to its elemental metaphorOh I truly believe everything is alive including you, me, this poem, the stone, the hammerIt’s just that we don’t own a bulletin boardThat floats.

—

Mr. Bean said — however futile it may be, the humane urge to define anything and everything is imperative, despite the irresolution. This process eventually leads you to accept the futility but not without relevant questions. These questions redefine what you essentially are.

—

Trappings are quite common in this landscape routinely evaluated serene hollow yet brimming with life trappedAnd the trapper never asks for your IDIt’s not the destination but the framework of sustainable prose. Avid ears wet ideas ambivalent punctuated words that give shape to a cemetery lingering in the shadow of hallowed windowsThis city will enable you to write these green faces percolating light through green eyes silent green words leaching down nourishing dead plants

—

And the decanter and the decanter’s metaphor and its vulnerability and its innerself sloshing at the hand’s approach, and the hand, its guarded manicure and the featureless hesitation traveling from the hand to the decanter and the sloshing innerself succumbing to the hand’s loneliness and its nowheredom and the etymology of the inner sloshing and its despotic truewhereness, mouth’s gullibility and …Damn it Mr. Bean, it was never my ambition to write a memorable line, I just wanted to write a memorable pause.

Mr. Bean said — It’s alright to feel cheated as this is the only emotion that truly is existential in principle. By the way, did you know that “morality” is a byproduct of the sense of being cheated.

Yet you float your elemental belongingness in unknown water, yet you acquire newer fears, yet you go searching for avoidable traps, yet you learn to love the arena where you have tasted your gore, bile, soliloquy, pride, helplessness, your continuum … time and again. Yet time and yet again …Mr. Bean said — Epigenetics is the heritable changes that take place without altering the genetic sequence — your habits/surroundings may switch off/on certain genes by just methylating or demethylating them …

and my fears now know — I thought, so I became … yet time and yet again …Oh how my fears inherit their fears …

—

It hurts ! This petulanceMr. Bean repeats — wisdom is the art of unlearning the obvious …Fucked up, I am so fucked up …He says: abandon this drama, theatricsHow do I unlearn my nourishments my soul That undulates on a fulcrum ofNon & Yonbugger you and bugger all, Mr. Bean

—

Mr. Bean said — Ignorance is the strongest force, beware.Am I merely the interpretation of my own undiscovered coordinatesAn imperfection conjoins the values of this sublingual weatherMy only regret is that I am forged to rememberOh I figured out — to forget is to attain freedom in its truest

Let me appreciate a bronze-flower a flesh-flower and their muted decorum striving to bury the immediate sense of necessity

Interpreting me through my follies Interpreting me through their follies

—

these streets you will walk again

Mr. Bean said — seasons changeso do street signs

a teardrop on a copper jacketa teardrop on a copperhead

once everything had a seasonnow a season has it all

I know for sureEven if I do not belongmy absence will hunt me out

my absence will hunt me down

—Mr. Bean said — Ask questions, if you may, but never seek an answer — every answer is a trap.

And then there are illusionsevery illusion needs a facea decapitated body does not exude transparencyIt’s a slow winterwe talk more aboutthe nature of storiesappropriate for a winter like thisabout coiled springsemotionsa distant frozen harbordead images of dead shipsbuoyed up to floatbuoyed up to last

We wonder if transparencyis truly a reflection that beams with a certain sense of assuranceI don’t have much problem with my transparency then

It’s one gorgeous winterfor a springloaderin search of strategic structures

immortal faces that came out to bask inpaltry sun

Silk

An April has touched me twicedug its pencil-heel in my eyes

Today was a perfect spring day. Cloudless. Spring-buds on every tree, though closed. Two more days of this light and heat and springtune will swirl out of them.

Praeclaraus secundum nex

A spring-molecule, speed — the third of a light, hits me, and my shadow, my unorbiting travels to you. Energy that is generated when the shadow returns to its original orbit will make this poem glow.

April 25th

I want to cleave my head in half and want to show you the void. My poetry and I, born from the same source, have traveled to two opposite poles.

A moth sits on the new lamp. It’s just April, where did the cocoon form? Will it live till June? They live only for two weeks! “Sabya” gets funny. Bring the book, bring the book. What’s the Family? Genus? Is it an early one? A new species? OMG, we are famous! A Swedish spring where the sun stays up late, even at 10 in the evening. A small hill outside my kitchen window. The old gnarled oaks, strapping birches. Sabya says — remember Bolpur in July? The sericulture farm? Crows flying, a feast in the air, silk-season. Cocoons, scales, bargaining. Where will the cocoons go? The handloom, spun-silk. Silk on lady’s bags, shirts, winter scarves.— Sabya, am I a moth?— What ! you don’t have faith in old Mr. Darwin any more?— Seriously Sabya, am I a moth?

I do not walk together with my art. From a source we both are born and then the art travels its own way and I mine. There is nothing before or after. Just two different directions. Poetry follows its own urge and I my own, to live and recreate. What happens to the origin? Does it survive? What happens to the notes of creation? Does it get immersed in boiling water and turn into a bubble? No one remembers the note Sabya, no one understands its tongue. When you come back to the origin, what do you see? A void in the skin of water? A void? An emptiness? With every poem a recurrence? How many times do you have to come back to such sorrow? Pathos! Pathos!

The moth flew towards July, itsmeanings towards Novemberand the notes of its moulting hormonebubbled through water.

As if monoliths were hewn from empty peopletransmitting a recurrenceAs if recurrence was a lamentation andwe lost its meaning in our own emptiness.

Lost! for habit has its own way ofdealing with consciousnessand fear is an essential that molds habit.Lost, for loss is a word that recurs without mercy.

We could identify our jerseysonly in the dialect of a broken mirrorand time became an evening washwe put on our faces and went to bed.

Think of a magic that is devoid of realityA reality that’s emptied of magic

Think, what does it take — fear/habit/loss —for our granaries to molt.And heaving enormous diaphragms,gleaming wings, the meanings of mothfly into a surgical table.

About points and a pair of clean underwear

Problem is, a point is thinking about mewhile I am trying to think about pointsseparately, one by one, without a line connecting lineany linear equationsand thus couldn’t dry my clothesWell, not a problem though, you won’t want your dirty linen washedin the pubMy father used to say — It’s imperative that one wears clean undergarments.Dying in a dirty one could shame you to death.I knew, a point is thinking about mesince I am thinking about points.They have dug up the roadsheavy rainsheaping soilflowing soilmud beachsewage river.I can’t,so the window weeps.I wouldn’t have believed a few days agohow believable incoherence could beuntil we attempt to describe it in our limp language.What color a point should carry —Let the point’s infinitesimal smallness decide thatHere, coconut grovesoceanan oblong moondoesn’t existA green dot beside ablue onea distant purple dota smoking “Sabya”a red dotglowingebbingNO LINES

Does a point see me and other points this way?

You would thinkstep by step a picture is made,a man.By putting your chin on your palmyou build leisureBy putting yourself in leisureyou build reflectionsa pasta future.And a point thinkshow the sound of a bomb detonatingoutside your windowwould travel from your skinto create a instant new past and futureBeside an ultra-violet dotI lay my clothes, still smelling of scrub-soapon grasseswhereI have losta teak foresta bungalowa water-well with bougainvilleanot in absent-mindednessbut in purposeful certainty.Is regret the first true consciousness?Is remorse the first sign of intellect?My window would only reflect mewet, brokendesperately in search of a tune to repair itself.Does the point want to say —“Sabya, Sabya — lines and melodies are unnecessaryas both want to communicate.”I feel the need to urinateI know in wet and cold visceral blood circulation increases.Yet, I want to follow the melody to thatgreat and earthly motelwhere in a white bathtubflows a stream of yellowin its true wholeness.Is stream a line too with an extra dimension of fluidity?Oh cerebrum! the right or the leftwhere do I put my stream?Where does the stream become a stone?The stone, that I am looking upon.Me, the stone is looking at.As I change my viewing angleyou change your color, texture.I too change my color, texturefrom your angle — isn’t it?A changed me I will see you.A changed you, you will see me.I am “Sabya” and I am the stone.But irrespective of everythingMy underwear is vocal, pure and clean.

Art and Therapy

The therapist said —Poetry is all about treatmentThe morning dose of ProzacAnd the related contemplation of multiple suicidesIt’s always about what you don’t seeUsing a song as filter or notDoesn’t matterIt always is what you don’t seeComing, goingWandering under lampshadesOn the bathroom tilesAnd always reciprocating with what it doesn’t seeYou open the innards of a road outThe unseen gutters and the brothelsDingy curtains, plush pink sofasUsed syringes, the sudden galeThe uptown flower marketBanana and melon peelsAnd the rings of Saturn around your left ballAnd they all are reciprocating with what they don’t see

see, the game of hide & seekit’s essentially 3 gameshideseekhide and seek the essence of what shall remain hidden, including you

Do you matter?Do I matter?For record, I no longer see the therapistAnd me

Art, society, therapy and mosquitoes

The therapist asked — what is artBut an organicaccessibility to intuitiona superfast feed-forward reaction leading to a non-valuebefore you can say — shit!(the action is hidden for the time being)alienation is what a performing artist does bestso, try define societyin terms of art andbingo!

Gentlemen, you have successfully reached The VOIDIt has been a long timeSince we watched TV together in a shallow roomTaking care not to drop blueberries on the couchMeeting eyes on an instinctive basisMosquitoes: Anopheles, Aedis, CulexSmile, grimaceAnd the loft had its fair share of spidersWeaving, sitting idle, not a single mosquito in the webA perpetually dark toiletWater stainsI mean, see, although you have moved to a better house3 bedrooms, living cum dining, 2 toilets and a kitchenCan’t help miss the studioIt’s the miseries that bond peopleMake societyYou want to call the new house a homeBring on theLeaking showerSwitchboards that come outwhen you literally pull the plugAnd there you go

Alienation is what a performing artist does bestWhile truly pursuing a de-alienationWithout caring to knowHow very similar it may lookThe mirror image is always reversed

Some poems are original English compositions; the rest are translated by the poet.

As this feature suggests, Bengali poetry has a long and rich history of incorporation and adaptation both in its language and in its sources. With work by Mesbah Alam Arghya, Subhro Bandopadhyay, Sukanta Ghosh, Raad Ahmad, Sabyasachi Sanyal, Santanu Bandyopadhyay, and Aryanil Mukherjee, “Adaptations in Bengali Poetry” brings together poets who read and work across a broad variety of linguistic and national traditions — from Canada to Chile to Spain, the Netherlands, Australia, India, and the US. The group creates a densely interwoven conversation that draws upon Bengali-language news sources, scientific journals, lyric meditations on exile, and cybernetics. This feature, created collaboratively by all of the poets and spearheaded by Mukherjee, provides a deep and wide introduction to this exciting movement in Bengali literature.